This year social networking topped the list, followed by Twitter, alcohol, chocolate, and swearing. It was a fairly typical year, with the top five the same as last year (though in a different order)–except for swearing, which came in at #6 last year, behind chips. (Chips had received a boost last year from Theresa May’s vow to give them up; this year they returned to closer to their usual spot.)

This year, 29,609 tweets (excluding retweets) specifically mention giving up something, down substantially from last year’s 73,334. In all, this year the analysis covers 427,810 tweets, down from 694,244 last year.

Relationships

As expected with Valentine’s Day falling on Ash Wednesday this year, relationship-related tweets increased:

Plastic

Fortnite

New to the list this year is Fortnite, a Hunger Games-style video game:

“It’s all they talk about,” said Glen Irvin, a teacher coach at a high school in Sauk Rapids, Minn., of “Fortnite”-playing students. “The only other game I’ve ever heard kids get this passionate about is ‘Minecraft.’”

Juuling

Resembling a flash drive, Juul conveys a sense of industry — you’re Juuling into your MacBook Air while you are cramming for your test on Theodore Dreiser and thinking about trigonometry — and it is so easy to conceal that, as one mother explained to me, she failed to notice that her daughter was vaping in the back seat of the car as she was driving.

Giving up juuling this year was nearly half as popular as giving up smoking:

Media Coverage

]]>Track in Real Time What People Are Giving Up for Lent in 2018https://www.openbible.info/blog/2018/02/track-in-real-time-what-people-are-giving-up-for-lent-in-2018/
Mon, 12 Feb 2018 13:00:50 +0000https://www.openbible.info/blog/?p=1415See the top 100 things people are giving up for Lent in 2018 on Twitter, continually updated until February 17, 2018. You can also use the Historical Lent Tracker to see trends since 2009, though 2018 is still in flux, so I wouldn’t draw any conclusions about 2018 yet.

As I write this post, with about 1,500 tweets analyzed, perennial favorites “social networking,” “alcohol,” and “twitter” lead the list. Ash Wednesday coincides with Valentine’s Day this year (and thus Easter with April Fools’ Day), so I expect relationship-related tweets to run higher than usual.

Look for the usual post-mortem on February 18, 2017.

]]>A Blended Account of Palm Sundayhttps://www.openbible.info/blog/2017/04/a-blended-account-of-palm-sunday/
Sun, 09 Apr 2017 05:47:34 +0000https://www.openbible.info/blog/?p=1394Gospel harmonies have a long history, dating back to the second century, and come in two main varieties:

1. Parallel

Accounts of similar events in different gospels appear in parallel columns so that readers can compare all four accounts side-by-side. This approach allows the distinctive voice of each author to remain, while visually emphasizing continuities and discontinuities–a story found in all four gospels looks much different on the page from a story found in only one. Typically parallels appear at the pericope or story level rather than at the word or verse level. Nearly all gospel harmonies we see today fall into this category.

2. Blended

A blended, or composite, gospel attempts to present the four disparate accounts as a single story, often picking a dominant gospel and using other gospels to fill in gaps. This approach emphasizes the unity of the gospel story while often smoothing over differences small (word choice) and large (chronology of events) among the gospels. It also diminishes the literary structure, purpose, and language of the individual gospel writers. In exchange for these drawbacks, a blended gospel (ideally) gains simplicity and narrative clarity.

The earliest known gospel harmony, the Diatessaron, dates from around 160 and is a blended account. Since the Protestant Reformation, however, parallel column-style harmonies have dominated.

A Digital-First Harmony

A blended digital gospel harmony can overcome many of the shortcomings of a static, print-based blended harmony for two reasons: unlimited space and interactivity.

Unlimited space allows harmonizers to make visible the choices they’re making as they blend accounts. Rather than choosing a single word and omitting variations from other gospels, they can show all the variations and allow the reader to check their work. This approach imports one of the advantages of parallel harmonies: it’s easy to see the similarities and differences among the different gospels. I feel that presenting these variants inline rather than visibly separate–as in different columns–only minimally disrupts the reading flow while giving readers the ability to understand the complexities involved for themselves.

Interactivity addresses three major problems of a blended gospel: which account takes priority, how to arrange the material chronologically, and determining whether different gospels are recounting either the same event with apparent discrepancies or two different events (e.g., Matthew’s sermon on the mount and Luke’s sermon on the plain). The solution in each case: let the reader choose.

In this way, harmonizers are creating less a product and more a system that allows readers to explore the system and draw their own conclusions.

Any blended harmony necessarily dilutes the intent of the original author–adding or omitting details is part of the editing process. However, by making such changes explicit and explorable, an interactive blended harmony can minimize the dilution.

Example: Blended Palm Sunday

This blended Palm Sunday account illustrates some of what I discuss above. All variations appear near the related main text. (The extent of your browser’s support of the <ruby> element dictates where the variations appear.) I also added some minimal interactivity: selecting the checkboxes changes the text from the selected gospels to red–in this case, all the text from Matthew is red. You can imagine other interactivity: maybe you can excise certain gospels, or choose which ones receive priority. John, for example, presents the Palm Sunday story in nearly reverse chronological order compared to the other three gospels; rearranging the synoptic narrative to fit John’s account would be an interesting exercise.

This example is just a proof of concept and took a surprisingly long time to put together. I can only imagine that constructing a complete blended harmony of the gospels at this level of detail would involve a large investment of time with no realistic commercial return. Kermit Zarley in 1987 published The Gospels Interwoven, an NIV blended gospel blurbed by Billy Graham; it was out of print a decade later and survives only in print-on-demand form. If a product like that doesn’t find commercial success, the one I’m proposing would find even less. Still, I like to think that this proposal serves as an example of a digital-first product that wouldn’t be possible in print form; it’s a bit ironic that technology could reintroduce and potentially improve the oldest approach to harmonizing the gospels: blended gospels like the Diatessaron.

This year, alcohol topped the list for the first time; it’s been hovering in the top five for the past few years, last year landing at a then-record #3. Possibly the recent popularity of Dry January (according to the article, 16% of British adults participated in 2016) is carrying over to Lent.

“Chips” cracked the top five this year largely because British Prime Minister Theresa May announced she was giving them up for Lent. This announcement had knock-on effects lower down the list, with “her favourite thing” and “live mice” both coming in at #88. The announcement of the potential closure of a U.K. chip factory the next day led to further jokes. For my U.K. readers, yes, I know you call them crisps (and your “chips” are U.S. “French fries”); I would now tell myself in 2009, when I first started compiling this list, not to combine “chips” and “crisps” into a single line, but it’s too late now.

Donald Trump is a big winner this year, landing at #22, just behind “Facebook” but ahead of “hope.” “The presidency” comes in at #52. In all, there are 1,002 tweets mentioning “Trump,” “President,” and “POTUS,” which is good enough for #10 on the list if we were to combine them all into a single line.

“The dirtiest thing” (#66) refers to a campaign to give up non-renewable energy.

This year, 73,334 tweets (excluding retweets) specifically mention giving up something. This total is up from last year’s 60,000 tweets; I used broader search terms this year (“lent” and “lent2017”) than I have in the past. In all, this year the analysis covers 694,244 tweets, up from 200,000 last year–again, largely because of the broader search terms.

Fast Food

Snack Food

Adulting

Emojis

Just over 14,000 tweets (19%) included an emoji this year. I haven’t tracked emoji usage before, so I can’t say how that compares to previous years.

Here are the top five emojis used this year, along with the most-popular items given up:

Emoji

Tweets

Most-popular Given Up

😂

2,428

chocolate, alcohol, twitter

😭

1,154

chocolate, sweets, fast food

😩

889

chocolate, sweets, fast food

🙃

875

chocolate, coffee, fast food

🙄

640

chocolate, alcohol, social media

Conversely, here are the most-popular things given up with tweets that include emojis:

Given up

Tweets

Most-popular Emojis*

chocolate

793

🍫 🙈 😫

social media

549

✌ 👋 🙏

alcohol

537

😅 ♀ 😬

twitter

482

✌ 👋 🙏

sweets

355

😅 🍬 🍫

* Excluding the top-ten emojis for the year.

Retweets

The rest of this data excludes retweets, but here are the three tweets mentioning Lent that drew the most retweets. I feel that this list encapsulates Twitter; not many other top-three lists would include college humor, the pope, and Rick “Never Gonna Give You Up” Astley.

Media Coverage

]]>https://www.openbible.info/blog/2017/03/what-twitterers-are-giving-up-for-lent-2017-edition/feed/3Track in Real Time What People Are Giving Up for Lent in 2017https://www.openbible.info/blog/2017/02/track-in-real-time-what-people-are-giving-up-for-lent-in-2017/
Mon, 27 Feb 2017 13:15:15 +0000https://www.openbible.info/blog/?p=1376See the top 100 things people are giving up for Lent in 2017 on Twitter, continually updated until March 4, 2017. You can also use the Historical Lent Tracker to see trends since 2009, though 2017 is still in flux, so I wouldn’t draw any conclusions about 2017 yet.

As I write this post, with about 1,600 tweets analyzed, perennial favorites “social networking,” “alcohol,” and “chocolate” lead the list. My main question, given the current U.S. political climate, is how high Donald Trump will rank: he’s currently vying with smoking and sugar for #24–last year, as a presidential candidate, he finished at #82.

]]>Jesus is not your passwordhttps://www.openbible.info/blog/2017/01/jesus-is-not-your-password/
Fri, 06 Jan 2017 18:39:19 +0000https://www.openbible.info/blog/?p=1365At Christianity Today I have a piece today about bad passwords that Christians use: Beware of Making Jesus Your Password. I’m pretty excited that they kept the line about soccer.

The main list of passwords comes from (1) taking this list, (2) removing non-alphanumeric and leading and trailing numbers, (3) lower-casing the result, and (4) combining the totals. In the raw list, “jesus” is the 103rd most-common password; by normalizing it with these steps, it jumps to #30. The purpose here is to find the core part of the password. It’s good from a security perspective that people add leading and trailing (mostly trailing) numbers to their passwords, but they’re not so relevant here.

The list of “Christian” passwords is based on a different breach of a faith-based website. I pulled a bunch of patterns from passwords that were popular there.

Here’s the data behind the piece:

normalized-passwords.zip. A list of 238,000 passwords following the normalization scheme I describe above. Every normalized password from RockYou that appeared at least ten times is here. Note that there’s extensive swearing.

verse-passwords.txt. All 295 plausible verse references. Not all of them are actually references: for example, “daniel14” could refer to Daniel 1:4 (or even Daniel 14), but it’s most likely just someone’s name with the number “14” after it. So I don’t include it in the top-25 list that appears at CT.

]]>The four kinds of one-year Bible reading planshttps://www.openbible.info/blog/2016/12/four-kinds-of-one-year-bible-reading-plans/
https://www.openbible.info/blog/2016/12/four-kinds-of-one-year-bible-reading-plans/#commentsThu, 29 Dec 2016 21:43:37 +0000https://www.openbible.info/blog/?p=1350Bible.com currently has 91 yearlong reading plans. By graphing these plans with time on the x-axis (January on the left, December on the right) and verse on the y-axis (Genesis at the bottom, Revelation at the top), we can divide them into four categories, labeled below:

First are continuous plans, which proceed in a sequential pattern through the Bible. They’re at the top of the above chart, characterized visually by strong lines proceeding from the lower left (January / Genesis) to the upper right (December / Revelation). They tend to cover substantial portions of the Bible, usually either the whole Bible or the complete New Testament. They generally ask you to read four or fewer distinct passages per day, with each passage about a chapter long.

Next are semi-continuous plans, which are the hardest kind to define. They feature stretches of reading that immediately follow from what you’ve just read, coupled with days of reading that are… not what you just read. You can see some lines go up to the left, similar to the continuous plans, and then they stop or dissolve into smaller sections. Defining a continuous vs. a semi-continuous plan is a matter of opinion; you could argue that some of the plans I’ve classified here as semi-continuous should be continuous. The most-interesting one to me is #34, the Book of Common Prayer Daily Office, whose pattern follows the liturgical year and doesn’t resemble any other plan on the chart. (Ten years ago I plotted both years of the Book of Common Prayer on a similar chart.)

Third are chronological plans, identifiable by their unique pattern of parallel passages in Kings and Chronicles (the parallel orange lines). Not all plans in this category are strictly chronological, but they have a similar organizing principle that produces the recognizable pattern of parallel paths.

Last are selections, which follow no discernible pattern and typically involve shorter readings–a few verses from multiple places in the Bible rather than reading full chapters. This kind of plan often includes devotional content related to the selected verses. The average plan in this category covers about 1,800 verses per year, or about 6% of the Bible’s 31,000 verses.

All the plans together

Here’s what all 91 plans look like overlaid on each other:

Paths radiate from Genesis in January through Job later in the year, varying mostly in the pace you’re reading the bulk of the Old Testament. In other words, if your reading plan starts by reading Genesis at the beginning of the year, you’re likely to proceed sequentially through the Old Testament until you reach Psalms. Similarly, paths converge on Malachi and Revelation in December.

Where are the digital-first plans?

The similarity among these plans suggests to me that they originate from a print-first mindset: what’s convenient to read in a physical Bible. You’re not, for example, going to flip to passages all over your print Bible every day unless you have unusually strong dedication to your reading plan.

But digital reading plans don’t have this limitation. Thanks to transclusion, a digital plan can collect content from all over the Bible (and elsewhere) and show it to you in one place, which means you can read much more widely on a single day if you like.

For example: let’s read through the Gospels chronologically in one year–that’s about ten verses a day–and also include ten cross-references for each verse every day. During a year, you read 14,104 different verses, or just under half the Bible. Here’s what the plan looks like schematically; you can see the paths through the Gospels, and overall it doesn’t look like any other plan:

And here’s what the content for a single verse from one day’s reading could look like (because there’s so much related text for each verse, this plan requires a little information design): the current Gospel verse is at the top. Below it are three columns: one for Old Testament references, one for other Gospel references, and one for non-Gospel New Testament references. I also included the same color-coding as in the other charts in this post.

Beyond transclusion, interactivity is a key property of digital systems. You could add interactivity by allowing the plan follower (with an interactive plan, they’re not just a “reader”) to configure the number of cross-references they read. Or tapping a cross-reference could open other verses they’ve read or will read as part of the plan–letting them explore more deeply and follow patterns as they desire. Adding interactivity to a system opens new avenues for insight.

Reading plans for augmented reality or audio-only interfaces will similarly vary in form from existing print-based plans. I would suggest that they will probably be even more conversational and dynamic than what I describe here.

I don’t know what shape future digital Bible reading plans will take, and the current approach of converting print-first plans to digital will certainly persist. But new digital-first reading plans will also come into being, and it’s important to experiment with what new technologies allow.

]]>https://www.openbible.info/blog/2016/12/four-kinds-of-one-year-bible-reading-plans/feed/1Super Mario Run is an exploration of free will vs. predestinationhttps://www.openbible.info/blog/2016/12/super-mario-run-is-an-exploration-of-free-will-vs-predestination/
https://www.openbible.info/blog/2016/12/super-mario-run-is-an-exploration-of-free-will-vs-predestination/#commentsTue, 27 Dec 2016 10:00:44 +0000https://www.openbible.info/blog/?p=1341Super Mario Run, an iOS game released December 15 and downloaded over 50 million times in its first five days, is a game about free will. Its three play modes reflect three different approaches to the topic.

Kingdom Builder: Free Will

The first play mode in Super Mario Run is Kingdom Builder, in which you can buy (with coins you collect elsewhere in the game) over 100 buildings and decorations to place anywhere you like on a map–think Animal Crossing or SimCity. A few buildings unlock new characters and courses, but little of what you do here affects the rest of the game.

In effect, you have consequence-less, complete free will within the constraints of the building system: you can do whatever you want.

Toad Rally: “Predeathtination”

In the second mode, Toad Rally, Mario runs on what looks like a standard course with enemies and obstacles. As in World Tour (the third play mode), he runs on his own; you only control jumping. The twist is that you’re racing against another player–with success measured not in speed but in coins and skillful jumping.

But you’re not competing live against another person; rather, you’re competing against the Mario Kart-style “ghost” of another player who’s previously completed it (aka, “asynchronous multiplayer”). However, you’re not even really competing against them–you’re competing against an artificial intelligence (AI) that plays like them based on their historical playthrough. If you play the same course against the same player repeatedly, their performance and score will vary slightly.

One thing doesn’t change with every runthrough: the deaths of the other player. And that’s where predestination (in the non-salvific sense) comes in.

In the above image, the current player as Luigi (in green, lower left) has run ahead of Mario and is waiting for him to appear on the screen. The circle with Mario in the upper left indicates that Mario is off the screen to the left and hasn’t arrived yet. Now look at the small “X” bubble near the yellow square on the right of the screen–it indicates that Mario will soon die there. (You can see a similar X bubble at the bottom of the screen, where Mario previously died.)

This image shows the scene three seconds later: Mario has met his fate, leaping to his fiery death (the bubble he’s in will transport him back to safety). Luigi can do nothing about it–no matter how many times you repeat the course, Mario will die at this spot, his algorithmic doom determined when you first decided to challenge this player.

While your character (here, Luigi) has the jumping freedom and the constant risk of death featured in World Tour, the AI competitor doesn’t–they’re always going to die at the ordained time and place.

World Tour: Partial Free Will

The third play mode, World Tour, most closely follows the traditional Mario experience of running and jumping. However, unlike a traditional Mario game, in Super Mario Run, Mario constantly runs to the right with no input from you–you can control when he jumps by tapping the screen, and that’s about it. (I’m glossing over some subtleties.) Thus, you have limited options to explore a course when Mario is running relentlessly to the right, especially compared to the near-limitless freedom that Mario usually has in his other games.

In part, this control constraint reflects iOS’s touchscreen interface. Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto says, “Our feeling was that by having this iPhone game in which Mario runs automatically and all you do is jump, we would actually have quite a bit of leeway to be able to create something that’s simple and easy for anyone to play, but still has some of that challenge and skill that super players desire…. By taking that approach, it would give even beginner players an opportunity to get a taste for what’s fun about the more skilled style of Mario play.”

From a game-design perspective, the single-tap interface justifies the automatic running and meets Nintendo’s goal of satisfying both novice and expert players.

However, from a philosophical perspective, World Tour reflects a hybrid of the complete free will of Kingdom Builder and the determinism of Toad Rally. Mario runs without input from you, but Mario needs you to jump, reflecting a more-constrained system than the usual Mario game has. It’s not quite the total freedom of Kingdom Builder or a typical Mario game, but neither does it feature the deadly determinism of Toad Rally. It presents a middle ground between the other two play modes.

Conclusion

The Wired article mentioned above says that a different team developed each play mode, and I suggest that each team, by accident or design, produced a distinct exploration of free will in each mode.

As you may have guessed by now, this post is mostly an attempt to justify spending $9.99 on Super Mario Run. Also, “predeathtination” (a word, oddly, that Google has never seen).

]]>https://www.openbible.info/blog/2016/12/super-mario-run-is-an-exploration-of-free-will-vs-predestination/feed/2Visualizing Bible chapter similarity with Quidhttps://www.openbible.info/blog/2016/12/visualizing-bible-chapter-similarity-with-quid/
https://www.openbible.info/blog/2016/12/visualizing-bible-chapter-similarity-with-quid/#commentsThu, 22 Dec 2016 18:50:03 +0000https://www.openbible.info/blog/?p=1336Quid, a natural-language processing and visualization startup*, last month produced a network graph of chapter similarity in the King James Bible. It does a good job clustering the gospels and epistles in the New Testament, though I might argue that you can largely distinguish them simply by the presence of “Jesus +said” vs. “Jesus -said”. Their full post details their methodology and colors the same visualization several different ways, including by sentiment and by popularity.

]]>https://www.openbible.info/blog/2016/12/visualizing-bible-chapter-similarity-with-quid/feed/2How violence, disease, and Donald Trump are signs of the end timeshttps://www.openbible.info/blog/2016/12/how-violence-disease-and-donald-trump-are-signs-of-the-end-times/
Fri, 09 Dec 2016 22:04:24 +0000https://www.openbible.info/blog/?p=1323At least according to searches for end times on Bible Gateway:

(The farther away the point is from the center of the circle, the more searches there were on that day.)

This image comes from The Three Kinds of Popular Keyword Searches on Bible Gateway, which talks about the three keyword search patterns Bible Gateway sees: perennial (not much variation throughout the year), event-driven (spikes around news cycles, like end times), and holiday-themed (spikes at the same time every year).

Bible Gateway doesn’t see much of a fourth pattern I might expect: a “seasonal” pattern that’s similar to “holiday-themed” but is more spread out and not driven by a particular day. For example, plotting Google Trends data for jacket using a similar methodology as above yields a much longer-lived rise and fall, where 75% of yearly searches happen between September and March, but there’s not a single, strong peak:

I think–but haven’t been able to locate independent research to prove–that most search keyword data will fall into one of these four patterns (perennial, event-driven, holiday-themed, and seasonal) when plotted on this kind of chart.

The immediate inspiration for this visualization was Google’s Rhythm of Food (also see the associated Wired article), which explores this kind of seasonality in food searches on Google: they identify “seasonal” and “holiday-themed” patterns. Rhythm of Food plots absolute numbers of queries, so you can see that searches for kale have been falling since 2014 (it’s clearer in the animation if you click through):

My interest in the Bible Gateway data wasn’t to track absolute numbers of queries but to explore yearly continuity, so each point on the Bible Gateway chart reflects the percent of queries on that day for the year (smoothed over the preceding and following three days). The downside of using percentages is that they can magnify small absolute differences.

Bible Gateway’s 2016 Year in Review lets you explore these patterns for 1,000 popular queries on Bible Gateway in 2016.